By Bridget Huber for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

In January 2019, students at Lovin Elementary School in Lawrenceville, Georgia, took a hard look at how much food they were throwing away. It was Taco Day, and as lunch period wrapped up, teacher Gerin Hennebaul and a group of students sorted the milk, fruit, vegetables, and other foods left on the cafeteria trays into buckets. “It really left an impact on the kids,” Hennebaul says. “They were shocked.”

The students weighed the waste and found that that day’s lunch, served to 721 kids, generated nearly 600 pounds of food waste. About 75 pounds of it was fruits and vegetables, and 120 pounds was still edible: unopened milk cartons, bags of baby carrots and sliced apples.

With more than 95,000 schools across the country serving lunch each day, that waste adds up. About 530,000 tons of food and 45 million gallons of milk is wasted in U.S. school cafeterias each year, the World Wildlife Fund estimates, which translates into about $1.7 billion worth of uneaten food. 

Dumping food in landfills releases methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. And wasting food indirectly drives extinction; agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss around the world — converting wild lands to cropland, diverting or polluting rivers and lakes, and pesticide use destroys habitats that wildlife need to survive. To tackle the environmental toll of landfilling all that food, environmental groups, like the World Wildlife Fund, have been working for about a decade with nearly 250 schools nationwide, including Lovin Elementary, to reduce waste but also to educate kids about the broader connection between the food they eat and issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. 

As Pete Pearson, the WWF’s senior director of food loss and waste, explains, making the cafeteria a classroom helps reduce waste now, and hopefully will produce a generation that’s more environmentally responsible than their parents. “When you get a school that is saying, ‘Hey, let’s take a look at our cafeteria, let’s understand the connection of food to the environment,’ then students start asking questions,” he says. 

Efforts to address food waste at the federal level have been less aggressive — but there are signs that’s starting to change. The U.S. has committed to halving the nation’s food waste by 2030. In December, the Biden administration proposed a national strategy to meet that goal, and tackling food waste at schools is part of the plan. But the USDA, which is responsible for feeding students, has not yet made cutting food waste a core part of school nutrition programs. Rather than wait for help from Washington, a handful of states, including Vermont and California, have passed or are considering laws making it illegal to throw away food scraps, which puts pressure on school districts to find ways to keep food waste out of landfills.

After Lovin Elementary’s first food audit, students started delivering PSAs during the morning announcements; one of their big messages was that taking milk at lunch isn’t mandatory, a common misconception that creates a lot of waste. They began feeding leftovers from the teachers’ salad bar to the school’s chickens. And Hennebaul set up a share table, where kids deposit unpeeled fruits and unopened packaged food, like granola bars. There’s a fridge for milk and baby carrots. Throughout the day, kids take and leave things from the table. Every morning it starts off empty, fills up, and then ends up empty again, Hennebaul says.

In March 2019, the school did another audit and found that waste had dropped from 589 to 435 pounds. The amount of discarded veggies fell to 47 pounds, and 108 pounds of edible food was sent to the share table instead of to the landfill. 

Since then — pandemic disruptions aside — Lovin has gradually ramped up composting; this year it has composted around 5,000 pounds of food. Most of the scraps go to the school’s garden, and some are shared with a local organization that trains adults with developmental disabilities to garden and compost. 

The food-waste program has led to many learning opportunities, Hennebaul says. Third graders teach kindergarteners how to compost and sort garbage, for instance, and measuring waste yields lessons on volume and decimals and how microorganisms break down food. The hope is that the big lesson — that food is not garbage — sticks too.

As schools like Lovin have tackled food waste piecemeal, some best practices have emerged. Audits are key; “unless you see it, it’s not real,” Pearson says. Share tables are a reliable way to cut waste and get food to kids who need it. Letting kids choose the foods they want at lunch, instead of serving everyone the same thing — a model called “offer vs. serve” — is another strategy that works. So is addressing milk waste. In addition to making sure students know they don’t have to take milk, some schools have replaced milk cartons with dispensers that let kids take as much or little as they want.

Advocates and researchers are trying to go beyond the school-by-school approach and collect data that can inform a comprehensive strategy for reducing food waste in schools on the state and national level. The EPA recently awarded the World Wildlife Fund $1.1 million to work with schools in Atlanta, Baltimore, Memphis, and Nashville to promote food waste reduction starting next fall. 

And in Maine, four public elementary schools of varying sizes took part in a pilot program last year, led by University of Maine researchers, that began with a waste audit and included sharing baskets for uneaten food and educational components. Kids watched a slideshow, for instance, that explained what they did and did not have to take in the cafeteria line, and that made explicit the links between food and the environment. One slide, titled “What happens when food goes in the trash?”, showed a photo of a polar bear clinging to a fragment of ice and a truck dumping garbage into a landfill. 

Over the nine-week course of the pilot, the schools cut waste by about 14 percent, saving a quarter-ton of food. Based on these results, the researchers estimated that putting a similar program in place statewide could reduce food waste by up to 325 tons, saving 4,263 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — about as much as taking 1,000 cars off the road.

Next year, with funding from the World Wildlife Fund, the researchers plan to expand the study. Finding ways to reduce waste in Maine schools is made even more urgent by the fact that it’s one of a small but growing number of states that now serve meals free to all students, regardless of family income, which has led to an uptick in the number of kids eating at those schools—and thus to the prospect of more waste.

While she supports efforts to make school food free to all students, Susanne Lee, a faculty fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, who led the Maine study, says expanding school food programs makes it even more imperative to develop policies at the state and federal level to address waste. “Who wouldn’t want to feed kids?” she said. “But if the kids are already throwing away forty percent of the food that we’re giving them, how is it helping?”

On a recent day at Sebago Elementary School, which took part in the Maine pilot, students filed into the lunch room, starting at a salad bar, where red peppers, cucumbers, and other vegetables were cut into large chunks. Kids waste less produce when they can choose what they take, and when it’s cut into kid-friendly forms, explains Morgan Therriault, the school’s food service director. Until recently, the school donated its food scraps to a local pig farmer, but the farmer retired and until they find another, the scraps are going in the trash.

At Sebago Elementary, lunchtime was unhurried and surprisingly calm. Kids have 30 minutes to eat. Experts say giving kids enough time to eat helps reduce wasted food, too, though schools that have to move many students through a small cafeteria often only give kids 15 to 20 minutes. Some schools, like Lovin Elementary, have experimented with playing music during some of the lunch period and asking kids to focus on eating—rather than socializing—while the music is on. Others feed kids lunch after recess, hoping they’ll work up an appetite and get most of their chattering done before sitting down to eat. 

Therriault says her school’s small size — just over 100 students — has advantages and disadvantages when it comes to addressing food waste. She and another staff member prepare and serve all of the food, so they see what kids like (tacos) and what they throw out (fish sticks). And the amount of waste generated is manageable enough that Therriault was able to bring the buckets to the pig farmer herself. The downside is staffing. The school’s food-waste work was started by a teacher with a passion for it, but he retired, leaving Therriault to continue the work on her own. Balancing cutting waste with making sure that everyone is fed and that kids with allergies are safe is a lot to manage, she says, and it’s hard to imagine growing the program without more support. 

Making sure that food waste reduction programs are sustainable and long-lasting is a real challenge. WWF has been pushing the federal government to make food waste reduction a key part of the USDA’s school meals programs, and Pearson says there’s political resistance to putting more money into nutrition programs. Legislation like the School Food Recovery Act, a bipartisan House bill that would give grants to help schools cut food waste, hasn’t passed. But gathering more data on what works could help make the case, and Pearson says he’s optimistic that waste reduction programs have bipartisan support.

“I think the problem always comes back to having to invest some money into it,” he says. 

But if schools can get a program in place, it takes on a life of its own, says Lee, the Maine researcher. “If you start those kids in elementary school, they will then be asking when they get to the middle school, ‘Where are our separate waste bins at lunch? Food shouldn’t go in the trash.’” 

At Lovin Elementary that’s exactly what’s happening. Other elementary schools in the district have begun composting, as has the high school. “You’re just watching it become part of our culture at school,” Hennebaul says, “and just part of who we are and what we do.”


Bridget Huber wrote this article for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.


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By Doug Bierend for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

On an unseasonably sunny day in March, at a community garden in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, Dan Gross and Shaq Benn moved piles of wood chips and hosed down shoulder-high windrows of compost. Tucked underneath elevated train tracks, Know Waste Lands is the home base of the compost-hauling nonprofit BK Rot.

Its quarter-acre lot houses custom-built tool sheds and water pumps, solar panels for charging phones and e-bikes, and a motorized sifter designed by Gross. As the pair worked, a steady trickle of locals stopped at the entrance to drop off kitchen scraps—not trash, but the makings of “black gold.” Thanks to careful management, even on this balmy day the steaming heaps of rotting vegetables didn’t give off an offensive odor. “I actually like the smell,” Gross said during a break from work.

BK Rot is part of a diverse ecology of community compost organizations throughout New York City. For decades, with crucial support via the city’s NYC Compost Project, community composters have taken a small but significant part of the roughly 4,000 tons of organic waste generated by New Yorkers every day and converted it into a valuable resource.

Food scraps and landscaping debris, rather than going “out of sight” to landfills, where they emit significant greenhouse gases, are transformed into material that sustains local gardens, fortifies the city’s heat-mitigating tree population, and remediates contaminated soils. Meanwhile, local residents are educated and empowered to manage their own waste, less pollution goes into transporting and processing food scraps, and community bonds are deepened.

Community composting is a cherished part of many neighborhoods throughout New York. But its future is unclear. In November of last year, under Mayor Eric Adams and his sanitation department’s new commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the NYC Compost Project was cut entirely from the city budget. So was a contract with the nonprofit GrowNYC, which operated dozens of food-scrap drop-off locations throughout the city, processing millions of pounds of scraps each year.

The cuts decimated community compost operations, costing dozens of jobs, closing down numerous processing locations, and curtailing educational programming. All to save around $7 million, a mere 0.006 percent of the city’s budget, or “less than a rounding error,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said at a recent rally in front of New York City Hall.

After an immense pressure campaign by activists, members of the city council, and other elected representatives, funding was restored at the end of June. With the vote, the budget for community compost was placed under the New York City council instead of the city’s sanitation department.

“I’m hoping that this will be less up for negotiation each budget season,” says Anna Sacks, legislative chair for the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board and co-founder of NYC’s SaveOurCompost coalition. “There’s so much more that we could do, and it ends up by necessity concentrating our efforts onto preserving what’s in existence, versus imagining a more expansive alternative future.”

Saved From the Trash

The NYC Department of Sanitation began supporting community composting in the early 1990s. It launched the NYC Compost Project, establishing and supporting compost operations at four of the city’s botanical gardens, along with satellite facilities at various parks and community gardens. The project also supported the beloved, now discontinued Master Composter program, to which many community composters in New York trace their roots.

As community composting evolved, the city also advanced its own curbside collection programs, which rely on contractors for transport and off-site processing. The city generates its own compost at a massive, recently expanded facility in Staten Island, though community composters note that the inconsistent separation of waste going in results in lower quality compost. In 2016, the city’s anaerobic biogas digester in Newtown Creek began accepting food scraps. Developed in partnership with the National Grid energy company, the giant “digester eggs” receive a mixture of organic waste streams, including sewage.

Rather than creating compost, though, the process produces methane that is burned for energy (and profit), along with an organic sludge that is landfilled. Besides not building soil, critics point out, the system entrenches reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure. Often, the methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is simply flared into the atmosphere.

Biogas and centralized organic waste collection are the other side of the community compost coin. They represent what Guy Schaffer, author of Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City, calls “neoliberal waste management.”

“There’s this pattern that happens in a lot of places, where people try to fix waste problems by creating new markets for waste,” said Schaffer, who is also a board member of BK Rot. In his analysis, such market “solutions” tend to perpetuate social inequities. “We can see the setting of a price on waste so that people have to pay for it, but that often creates a situation where waste winds up getting recuperated by the most marginalized people.”

BK Rot is a somewhat unique example among the city’s community composters. Although it is largely funded by grants, including as part of a crop of new additions to the restored NYC Compost Project, it operates like a business: In exchange for a fee, the nonprofit collects organic scraps from residences and small businesses, hiring local Black and brown youth who haul the material away by cargo bike to be windrowed. The resulting compost can be bought directly onsite, or at local food co-ops, where it is sold in smartly branded pouches resembling bags of designer coffee.

The upshot of BK Rot’s work is that, along with creating a valuable resource and reducing landfill—they claim to have diverted 1.5 million pounds of organic waste to date—it provides work opportunities within a community where gentrification has made such opportunities increasingly scarce. Meanwhile, fewer food scraps fill trash bags on the street corner to attract rats, or fill up trucks and landfills that typically operate near marginalized neighborhoods.

“Bushwick is such a fascinating focal point for thinking about waste inequity and intersectional inequities as they relate to environmental justice,” Nora Tjossem, co-director of BK Rot, said. “[BK Rot] really is an answer to say, ‘Well, what if we can dream up a different system? What if we can address all of these problems at once, or at least a great number of them?’ . . . We can create a system that can actually create green jobs for young people, that can serve as a fossil-fuel-free waste alternative—and even reframe what waste is.”

Grab a Pitchfork

Each instance of community compost takes a slightly different approach, responding to local conditions and needs. They are what Schaffer calls experimental infrastructures, alternatives to the status quo established in its midst. To address the income inequities of the neighborhood where it operates, BK Rot takes a labor-centric view, making its priority one of engaging and employing local youth. Other composters may rely more on volunteer labor and try to leverage the value of the material itself, using markets to foster different relationships between communities and waste.

“These interventions are not idealistic escapes from reality,” Schaffer writes in Composting Utopia. “They remake the systems they inhabit. Community composters aren’t trying to figure out if community compost will or won’t work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, they’re building worlds in which community compost does work, and inviting people to stop by and grab a pitchfork.”

Despite the struggles for funding, community composters remain supportive of the city’s various efforts to divert organic waste. In April 2023, Mayor Adams unveiled an initiative called PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done. Among its promises were an expansion of tree canopies, curbside rain gardens, and green jobs, along with a reduction in emissions. All these aims are helped by community compost, which makes the recent struggles over funding and access to land particularly vexing to community composters, who see their efforts as complementary, while noting that the city has ample funds for projects like a quarter-billion-dollar police training facility.

The Struggle Continues

The city’s restoration of the NYC Compost Project in June means that community compost can continue developing, though the form that will take is undetermined. A number of small operations will receive restored funding. “GrowNYC is no longer operating the food-scrap drop-off sites in the green market,” Sacks said. “As a result, there was money that we could reallocate to other groups. Something we as a coalition have wanted to see for a long time is not just the established community composting groups being funded by the city, but new ones that are doing great work also being funded.”

But the cuts have had lasting consequences. The nonprofit Big Reuse lost access to its Brooklyn Salt Lot site in January as result of rezoning. Since 2011, it had operated a state-of-the-art composting facility underneath the 59th Street Bridge in Queens, composting over 3 million pounds of Parks Department leaves and wood chips. Just last year, it generated 700 cubic yards of compost that went to 154 different parks, schools, community gardens, and various greening projects. The cuts to the Community Compost Project also forced Big Reuse to reduce its staff, and coincided with the loss of access to its Queensbridge site. The city’s Parks Department claimed it needed the site for a parking lot, despite owning an empty lot next door.

All of this underscores the crucial role of land, and of a positive relationship with the city, in enabling community composting. The Queensbridge site closed despite immense public outcry, expressed through representatives, petitions, letters, and public testimony at various hearings, press conferences and rallies. “It’s literally paving paradise to put up a parking lot,” said Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council who works to protect community composting. Other community composting operations have been disrupted at least in part, including the Lower East Side Ecology Center, Earth Matter, and all four botanical gardens.

Still, many of the city’s leaders do see the value of community compost. Twenty-nine out of 51 city council members, and four of the five borough presidents, signed letters to the mayor and New York Department of Sanitation supporting this summer’s restoration of funding to community composters. More than 49,000 New Yorkers also signed a petition demanding the same, in an effort organized by the SaveOurCompost coalition.

In parallel with the city’s expanding curbside program, community composters will again have the means to develop experimental infrastructures, while also filling the gaps within the city’s waste operations. With proper support, the diverse network of community compost operations can offer a meaningful alternative and complement to centralized, carbon-intensive systems, which in New York currently capture only about 5 percent of organics in the waste stream. The hope among community composters is that the value of what they do is now clear to the city and the public alike, and that New Yorkers will treat food scraps not as trash but an opportunity to improve life in the city.

“I hope that all this drama results in a broader public understanding of what composting is and what is required as a land-based movement,” said Gil Lopez, an activist for community compost and a member of the Queen Solid Waste Advisory Board Board. “Invisibilization of waste is what I believe the mayor and [the department of sanitation] want to make happen. This allows [and] demands the public not think about it once it leaves their home. Community composting humanizes ‘waste’ and transforms it into a local resource and tool for raising ecological literacy, civic engagement, physical activity, and local responsibility for reducing our own impact in environmental injustice.”


Doug Bierend wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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A new study found Maine households are a leading contributor of food waste in local landfills, which in turn contributes to climate change.

Researchers said as the waste breaks down, it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Susanne Lee, faculty fellow for the Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Science at the University of Maine, said reducing food waste is one of the easiest ways to solve the problem.

"Not everybody can get a new electric vehicle but everybody can shop more wisely, do meal planning," Lee pointed out.

Lee noted new data on where and how food waste is generated will be added to the state's climate plan. She argued it could help in building the needed infrastructure to transport, store and distribute excess food from farms and businesses. About one in eight Mainers experienced food insecurity in 2022, including one in five children.

A recent pilot program helped four elementary schools in Maine reduce their food waste by up to 20% while improving kids' nutrition. Students learned about waste in landfills and got a close-up look at their own waste by sorting their scraps and trash. Lee believes early education programs will be key to helping Mainers build sustainable habits and ensure the state reaches its own climate goal of net-zero emissions by 2045.

"A simple 10-minute explanation of how food is meant to be nutritious and not meant to be trash," Lee explained. "These children can get it."

Lee added new funding will allow researchers to continue the elementary school programs and even follow one school's students into middle school to see if their new habits stick. Legislators are also considering an outright ban on food waste in landfills, something already enacted in every other New England state.

By Meg Wilcox for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

At Johnny’s Luncheonette, a family-style diner in the greater Boston area serving sandwiches and breakfast all day, customers can take their meal to go in a lime-green, durable plastic container that is borrowed like a library book and designed to be reused hundreds, if not thousands, of times by other restaurant patrons.

Customers don’t pay extra for the reusable take-out box. They simply need to download an app called Recirclable, and—to avoid paying a $15 fee—return the container within two weeks to one of 14 restaurants participating in Recirclable’s reuse program.

Johnny’s Luncheonette is among a small but growing number of restaurants taking steps to move away from single-use plastic take-out containers, which usually end up in the trash because they can’t be recycled. Worse yet, mismanaged plastic waste eventually enters the oceans, where it kills sea creatures that ingest it and breaks apart into toxic microplastics the size of a lentil or smaller.

Restaurants and food services use nearly 1 trillion pieces of disposable food service ware and packaging annually in the U.S., according to Upstream, a reuse advocacy organization.

Johnny’s Luncheonette began offering the reusable take-out containers earlier this year because its owner, Kay Masterson, was tired of the Sisyphean search for an environmentally friendly disposable take-out box. “Ideas like Recirclable are a much better option because it takes out the conversation of, ‘Well, which takeout container is less bad?’” she said. “Reuse is just smart. It’s smart resource-wise. It’s smart cost-wise.”

Masterson pays more per piece for the reusable packaging but said that she expects costs will drop below disposable packaging as more customers use the service. Thus far, only dozens of customers have selected the reusable option.

Many case studies show that while reusable containers cost more upfront, businesses start to save fairly quickly. What’s more, “It’s not just about saving money but about building resiliency so that you have shorter supply chains without so much global dependency,” said Elizabeth Balkan, director of Reloop America, at Reloop, a nonprofit operating in both Europe and the U.S.

Moving from single use to reuse is one of the biggest opportunities for reducing plastic pollution, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a reuse pioneer. Reuse services targeting food businesses are growing quickly in the U.S., especially for arenas and stadiums, colleges and K-12 schools, corporate offices, and other institutions.

Startups offering logistics and dishwashing are proliferating, as are nonprofit organizations providing strategic support, funding, and advocacy. But reuse is still far from the norm in the U.S. Communities need shared reuse infrastructure for the practice to pick up steam, according to Crystal Dreisbach, CEO of Upstream. Cohesive, city-scale systems could help shift consumer habits and increase the volume of materials being reused, which is essential for both economic and environmental impact. Enabling policies would hasten the transition.

“You can’t have consumers running all over town, dropping off things in [different] places. You’re going to need big infrastructure that will accommodate this massive systemic change away from disposable to reusable,” Dreisbach said.

Reuse on the Rise

Reuse services are emerging in cities across the country, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. Startups like Vessel and Turn Systems offer customers a reusable cup option at the point of sale that can be returned at kiosks or bins. DeliverZero provides reusable take-out containers at some 150 restaurants in New York City, Boulder, Colorado, and California, and at Whole Foods stores in Boulder. Usefull offers stainless steel containers on college campuses. Bold Reuse services large venues in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Kansas City, and Phoenix, while Dispatch Goods in San Francisco and ReUso in Chicago serve restaurants and institutions.

Dishwashing and sanitizing systems are also emerging, since they’re key to any reuse system. Restaurants handle their own dishwashing in Recirclable’s system. Other reuse companies provide dishwashing, including via mobile units at large venues, or contract it out to large washing stations like Re:Dish, which operates in New York City and Philadelphia and is equipped with technologies for tracking and sorting packaging.

ReThink Disposable provides free reuse consulting to restaurants, institutions, and large venues in Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England. The nonprofit also raises funding to buy reusable packaging and/or install dishwashers at restaurants and food delivery programs run by nonprofits, such as Truro Community Kitchen.

Reusable containers come in ceramic, glass, stainless steel, and plastic, depending on the venue, but, for takeout, “most restaurant owners prefer durable, No. 5 plastic [polypropylene type] because they store and stack easily,” are lightweight, and can be microwaved, said Amber Schmidt, New England zero-waste specialist at ReThink Disposable.

While “reusable plastic may be an imperfect solution, it is still a critically important step in the right direction,” toward an overall reduction in plastic packaging, Balkan said.

Volume Is Key

Recirclable was co-founded in 2021 by Margie Bell, who worked for decades on ecommerce and point-of-sale applications in the software industry. “Our vision was, ‘Let’s have this happening at every restaurant and, like library books, you borrow at one and you return to another.’” 

Recirclable’s volume is small. Its users are dedicated customers who follow it from restaurant to restaurant, Bell told Civil Eats. “We’re in the thousands—and we’d love to be in the tens and hundreds of thousands—but we have to grow the network” of restaurants.

“The biggest hurdle with Recirclable is just getting the word out there and changing habits,” said Masterson.

Recirclable’s small network of restaurants also limits its growth. Customers must live near a restaurant where they can return the container, or the system doesn’t work for them. The number of steps required is another barrier. Johnny’s Luncheonette Manager David Martinez said that when some interested people learn they have to download an app and put in their credit card, they decline.

“We recognize that can cause friction,” said Bell, who won an award from the EPA to develop a new system, launching this year, that will be accessed with one tap of a credit card.

Recirclable is not alone in having difficulty reaching volume—“the cornerstone” of reuse, Dreisbach said. “You cannot make the system work, you cannot make the economics work, until you have volume.”

Re:Dish’s washing station in Brooklyn, for example, can handle 75,000 reusables daily, but “we’re not anywhere near there right now,” CEO and founder Caroline Vanderlip told Civil Eats. Re:Dish is on track to handle 4.5 million containers this year, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion pieces of packaging used in the food sector, she said.

Transformational Change

To scale up reuse, Dreisbach envisions municipal waste and recycling centers becoming reuse centers. Reuse represents “a really cool new revenue stream” for recycling facilities, which struggle with volatility in recovered materials markets, she said.

Private investment, government funding—including from the Inflation Reduction Act—and forward service contracts with large anchor clients such as arenas could support such infrastructure development. The nonprofit Perpetual, in fact, is now working to design and implement city-scale reusable food service ware solutions in collaboration with Ann Arbor, Michigan; Hilo, Hawaii; Galveston, Texas; and Savannah, Georgia.

Laws mandating reuse would hasten the transition, as they have in Europe, where reuse is more widespread, Balkan told Civil Eats. Oregon, California, and Maine have passed laws moving in this direction that will raise funds for reuse, she said.

But big consumer brands also need to lead the way on shaping consumer attitudes about reuse, said Driesbach. “They have a great deal of power to decide what that packaging is,” she said, adding that consumers are ready for reuse. “COVID really showed us what appeared in our trash cans at home because we were all getting takeout. Awareness about trash has increased hugely in the last five years.”


Meg Wilcox wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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